Resistance

Chapter 1 Apocalypse I remember the morning the letter came. I left the apartment Mary and I were renting on rue Lepic and strolled in the sunshine up to rue des Abbesses. The old sidewalks were freshly washed, the air was still cool. My regular way was to get a morning paper, a brioche, and black coffee and then sit in the little park by the Metro station and read. Sometimes I would walk up Yvonne-le-Tac to the terraced park below Sacre-Coeur instead, but that morning I had that fistful of mail. We took the apartment partly because it was right around the corner from the cemetery in Montmartre. Mary was writing an essay about the cemeteries of France for Harper's, a history of how they had been disrupted and desecrated by revolution, by the expansion of cities, and of course by the Church. The Cimetiere de Montmartre was palpable, a reassurance to her. Many of its graves had been destroyed in 1789, the bodies treated like so much trash by those who hated royalty and aristocracy, and by the hoodlums who always attach themselves to social change. But Degas is buried there, the composer Berlioz, Nijinsky, and her favorite, Adolphe Sax, the inventor of the saxophone. It was not these ghosts, though, nor the untroubled allees colonnaded by plane trees, that calmed her. It was that the stillness sheltered an aggregation of mute evidence, apparent throughout the city in its small-scale neighborhoods, that our history is finally human. Regimes and ideologies-Tamerlane's Mongol empire, Caligula's Rome, Stalin's Soviet Union-whatever their horrors, whatever afflictions they deliver, pass away. What endures is simple devotion to the question of having been alive. The cemetery comforted her because it was not about death but about transcendent joie de vivre. One day she returned to the apartment and read me an inscription she'd copied from a gravestone. Ma gracieuse epouse . . . A husband had expressed his love and regard for his wife of fifty-one years in a few bare, unself-conscious sentences. Mary sat with the piece of paper in her hand by the open window, watching patrons in the bistro across the street talking and hailing friends passing on the sidewalk, and turned a shoulder so I could not see her crying. Her tears, I thought, were over a kind of loss we had talked about in recent weeks, the way the fabric of love scorches, no matter how vigilant we are. The intricate nature of the emotions men and women exchange made the two of us sense our own endangerment when we disagreed; but we had also been speaking of the ephemeral love one can feel toward a complete stranger, for the way they step off a sidewalk or a father hands his daughter her gloves at the door. Bound together in these many ways we are still swept suddenly out of each other's lives, by tides we don't recognize and tides we do. The sensation of loss, the weight of grief, the feeling of being naked to a menace are hard to separate. The fear of an outside force at work makes us reticent in love, and suspicious. We identify enemies. The instruments of discord show up daily in our lives, of course, demanding our attention. The unscrupulous peer, the woman on the make, the purblind enforcer, the self-anointed official and his cronies, people with a craving for confrontation. We are foolish to give any of them what they ask for, and we betray ourselves and anyone toward whom we have ever felt tender by not sending such people immediately on their way. The first two pieces of mail I opened that morning were letters from museums, one in Rouen, the other in Orleans. At the time, I was trying to assemble work by European artists which had been shaped by their experience with le Maquis, the French underground, for a show to open at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and then to travel around the United States. The communications were about insuring the works the museums werLopez, Barry is the author of 'Resistance', published 2004 under ISBN 9781400042203 and ISBN 1400042208.